Fairy scholarship is not for kids-nor for the faint of heart. Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota and a longtime board member of this journal, in the course of four of his latest books, published between 2012 and 2015, journeys through a forest of disciplines and insights ranging from (1) history (one motivation for the Grimms' collection of German folk narrative was to shore up national identity in response to the French cultural threat imposed by the Napoleonic Wars) to (2) literature (in the seven editions of the tales, the writing style and moral philosophy of the tales grew increasingly more sophisticated), (3) folklore (although not the first to publish oral and oral-inspired narrative, the Grimms inspired countless other scholars and collectors worldwide), (4) political science (the magic in the tales reflected and stoked a Utopian vision for people with precious little cause for idealism and hope), and (5) sociology (it was the infantilizing English-language editions that cemented the reputation of the fairy tales as children's literature).Indeed, Zipes, whose 1979 Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales introduced a generation to his distinctive perspective on the vitality-and vital importance-of the genre, notes that the Grimms were already serious scholars in their teens. Their field was philology, the study of the structure and development of language, but their interest in preserving (while in fact modifying and in some cases even transforming) the oral narratives told by the German people soon eclipsed any other work, at least for Wilhelm and at least in non-German-speaking countries.1 It is little wonder. The brothers, finding themselves heads of their penniless household after the sudden death of their father, could have used a bit of the magic that buoyed Cinderella and the Goose Girl or, for that matter, millions of their compatriots mired over the centuries in soul-crushing feudalism. The images (and metaphors) of justice over cruelty, of miraculous eleventh-hour salvation in the midst of overwhelming despair, and of supportive animals and astonishing powers may well have engendered hope as much to them as to their informants and readers.To some extent, of course, it is as fraught an enterprise to bring personal biography and psychology into the motivation to study a great subject as it is to anything else. One might as easily ask, for that matter, why fairy tales hold such a fascination for Zipes. In fact, he did once answer the question at least in part in an interview:Ever since I was eight years old I began writing stories and sitting on floors in libraries and reading myself into other realms. [...] I think, like many people, I find our reality so disturbing, so unfulfilling, so corrupt, and so barbaric that I began conceiving alternatives to our social condition. All good literature provides hope, but the best of fantasy literature provides extraordinary hope, and I guess that is what I am after-extraordinary hope. (Short Interview; emphasis added)This activist approach to folk literature not only propels Zipes's work but also apparently inspires him in his engagement with other notable scholars of the genre. As he points out in Grimm Legacies, two of the biggest names in German intellectual history, the philosopher Ernest Bloch and the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, contributed to the Grimms' cultural legacy by exploring the profound ramifications of the fairy tale (187). More to the point, in The Irresistible Fairy Tale, Zipes argues with great restraint against the reductionist scholarship of Willem de Blecourt, which he considers admirable, if flawed. Of de Blecourt's contribution to the long-standing debate about the ratio of orality to literary sources of folk narrative, Zipes writes,Throughout de Blecourt's book he writes as if folklorists had conspired to invent romantic notions of the folk and folklore that silence the true originators of the fairy [. …